You gotta love Weird Al Yankovic. Shamefully, I had discovered him rather late in the day, when he had released his spoof of Coolio’s Gangsta’s Paradise back in 1996, to be exact.
Since then I’ve kept a more or less close eye on his material. Some of it is funny, some is forced, but not enough so to irritate. A Weird Al track is guaranteed to elicit at least a couple of smiles, if not outright LOLs.
And whereas most artists do the opposite of wine, becoming lamer by the year, Weird Al’s latest material is actually gold. His spoof of Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines, titled Word Crimes was both witty and refreshing.
Everyone was tired of listening to the obvious criticism about Thicke – misogyny, encouragement of the rape culture and general creepiness.
Weird Al, instead, focused on Thicke’s less-than-stellar grammar. The track includes lines like:
“Okay, now here’s the deal
I’ll try to educate ya
Gonna familiarise
You with the nomenclature
You’ll learn the definitions
Of nouns and prepositions.”
Pure gold. Weird Al’s 2014 album Mandatory Fun has, in fact, been released to highly positive reviews.
The album includes spoofs of Lorde’s Royals, Pharrell Williams’s Happy, Imagine Dragons’ Radioactive and Iggy Azalea’s Fancy.
Now, Weird Al struck gold once again at this year’s Emmy Awards, which took place last week.
In fact, he was what you might call the high point of awards that have become somewhat boring and predictable.
I mean, seriously, did anyone doubt that Breaking Bad would carry off the main honours? Or that Modern Family would win Best Comedy?
Or that Sheldon (sorry, Jim Parsons) would once again get the best actor for a comedy series?
As for Sherlock’s Benedict Cumberbatch...there would probably have been international rioting if the best lead actor for a miniseries had gone to anyone else.
But back to Weird Al. During the Emmy’s ceremony he parodied the theme songs to most of this year’s nominated shows.
To be brutally blunt, the mash-up didn’t really work wonderfully, but just the fact that he went for it was fun enough.
Martin looked less than amused; we saw how he deals with fans who pester him to finish the series
There was Mad Men, Homeland, Modern Family and Scandal.
And, most importantly, there was Game of Thrones. Writer George RR Martin, on whose A Song of Ice and Fire books the television series is based, has become most fans’ favourite person to hate (including mine).
Not because we hate his work, on the contrary. Because the man had better finish writing the series already before succumbing to a heart attack or something.
What made Weird Al’s contribution particularly apt is that he finished off by presenting a typewriter to Martin, urging him to “type as fast as possible”.
Martin looked less than amused – we saw how he deals with fans who pester him to finish the series, ie basically by telling them to eff off (which he is well within his rights to do so, of course).
As for the rest of us, we couldn’t stop laughing.
ramona.depares@timesofmalta.com